Tarek Alrefae

Introduction

Tarek is a Stipendiary Lecturer in Statistics at St Peter’s College and a DPhil student in the Department of Statistics, supervised by Professor Christl Donnelly and Professor Ben Lambert. His thesis is on the role of heterogeneity in infectious disease and epidemic models. He also holds a Stipendiary Lectureship in Mathematics at Corpus Christi College.

Teaching

At St Peter's he teaches Prelims Probability, Prelims Statistics and Data Analysis, Part A Mathematical Biology, and Part A Numerical Analysis. He has tutored Prelims Analysis, Part A Probability and Statistics, and several Part B and Part C statistics courses. He also lectures on the MSc in Modelling for Global Health.

Research

Tarek's research focuses on how infectious diseases spread through structured populations, and on what can be inferred about them from incomplete data. He develops Bayesian and network methods for recovering hidden structure in epidemics: latent infection risk from serological assays, variation in susceptibility between hosts, and contact structure from digital contact tracing data. He is also interested in sensitivity and identifiability — which parameters a model can actually learn from a given dataset.

Selected publications

Alrefae, T., Pons-Salort, M., Donnelly, C. A., Lambert, B., Kamau, E. “A Bayesian modelling framework for inference of latent infection risk patterns from virus neutralisation assay data.” Under review, PLoS Computational Biology.

Alrefae, T., Gao, B., Lambert, B., Donnelly, C. A., Águas, R. “Heterogeneous susceptibility inference in real-time.” Under review, Nature Communications.

Kim, Y., Chen, J., Yan, A., Alrefae, T., Bajaj, S., Donnelly, C. A. (2026). “Estimating total human deaths from rabies.” PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, 20(9): e0014731.

Mills, C., Alrefae, T., Hart, W. S., et al. (2025). “Renewal equations for mosquito-borne diseases.” Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 16(11), 2653–2666.